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Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Bethesda, MD – The Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) is pleased to announce the release of the latest publication in the Horizons in Bioscienceseries, "Epigenetics: Looking Beyond Our DNA." This article describes the emerging field of epigenetics and its contributions toward treating and preventing disease.

Our physical appearance and susceptibility to disease were once thought to be hard-wired within our DNA, but now scientists are starting to decipher how biological and environmental factors influence health and disease. Epigenetics is a rapidly advancing area of investigation in which changes in gene expression as a result of DNA modifications rather than from changes in the underlying DNA sequence are studied. With support from the National Institutes of Health and other federal agencies, the study of epigenetics has led to the development of therapies for cancer and to a better understanding of disease susceptibility.

The Horizons in Bioscience series is a collection of short, illustrated articles, published by FASEB, that describe scientific discoveries on the brink of clinical application. Hardcopies of the articles are available at no cost for educational or advocacy purposes and can be requested by visiting the Breakthroughs in Bioscience website at www.faseb.org/breakthroughs or by contacting FASEB's Office of Public Affairs at 301-634-7650.

FASEB is composed of 26 societies with more than 120,000 members, making it the largest coalition of biomedical research associations in the United States. Our mission is to advance health and welfare by promoting progress and education in biological and biomedical sciences through service to our member societies and collaborative advocacy. URL: http://www.FASEB.org

Announcement and call for application to the EMBO Global Lecture Course (with support from the International Network of Institut Pasteur (RIIP) on "High-throughput Next Generation Sequencing Applied to Infectious Diseases" (http://events.embo.org/14-ht-ngs/ ) which is going to take place in the Institut Pasteur de Tunis, Tunisia, September 15-25, 2014.

As more and more massive omics data are generated, efficient platforms are continuously thriving to offer advanced data analysis tools/methods. This Course is aimed at motivated post-graduate biologists, bioinformaticians and computer scientists of an intermediate level working on high-throughput data to gain skills and learn dedicated methods for their data analyses. This course is open to international participants.

Up to 20 full time places will be available for the course. Acceptance will be subjected to an evaluation process.
Participation fees are 150€ and 1000€ for Academic and Industry applicants respectively (Fees include full accommodation during the whole course).

This Course will be balanced between lectures and tutorial sessions for NGS data analyses. A series of lectures on recent hot topics related to NGS data analyses and parasitic genomes are included in the program. Tutorial sessions, performed in a Linux environment, will consist of hands-on exercises or live demonstrations on computers.

Tuesday, April 8, 2014

Special Issue on Advances in Computational Methods for Genetic Diseases

Genetic diseases are widely studied for the relevant impact on the human health. In the last years, a large amount of experimental data has been available. The identification of new strategies for elaborating such experimental data is becoming more and more necessary since the large amount of information can sometimes represent a real obstacle for the effective identification of relevant findings. The aim of the special issue is to review the recent advances about the research on computational methods concerning with genetic diseases. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

Before submission authors should carefully read over the journal\\\'s Author Guidelines, which are located at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/cmmm/guidelines/. Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the journal Manuscript Tracking System at http://mts.hindawi.com/submit/journals/cmmm/genet/ according to the following timetable:

Manuscript Due Friday, 19 September 2014
First Round of Reviews Friday, 12 December 2014
Publication Date Friday, 6 February 2015

Thursday, April 3, 2014

The German Conference on Bioinformatics (GCB) is an annual, international conference devoted to all areas of bioinformatics, with a tradition reaching back in the 1990ies. Recent meetings attracted an international audience of 250 - 300 participants. In 2014, the GCB is hosted by the bioinformatics groups of Bielefeld University. It is organized by the German Society for Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology (DECHEMA), and supported by the Special Interest Group on Informatics in Biology of the German Society of Computer Science (GI) and the Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (GBM).

GCB 2014 invites the submission of papers on all aspects of bioinformatics. Areas of interest include

The conference language will be English. GCB invites contributions of the following types.

Regular papers should have 8-10 pages and will be published in the conference proceedings (GI-Edition Lecture Notes in Informatics (LNI)). Paper submissions will be peer-reviewed by the program committee and judged by quality, originality and relevance. Submissions may cover any area of bioinformatics.

Highlight papers should report on recent work, preferably published during the present or past year. Topics include biological findings with bioinformatics methods, new computational methods or new software tools. Highlight papers should be submitted as an abstract of at most 4 pages (including references). Submissions will be judged by the importance and novelty of the findings and relevance to the conference audience. Highlight abstracts will be made available via the conference website.

Posters should present recent scientific work in any area of bioinformatics. Poster abstracts should not exceed 300 words including references.

Submission with easy chair (via the conference website www.gcb2014.de) is open from the beginning of May until May 30, 2014.

The conference program will be augmented by additional satellite workshops. Please check our call for workshop proposals.

The GCB 2014 Program Committee invite proposals for Satellite Workshops. The workshops will be held on September 28 at the Bielefeld University.

The workshop organizers will be responsible for advertising the workshop, forming the program committees, reviewing and selecting the papers, and guaranteeing a high quality worthy of the prestige and range of the Conference. Workshop papers will not be published in the GCB conference proceedings but may be published on other formats chosen by the workshop organizers.

Workshops should cover at least a single session (4-6 regular papers). The workshop organizers should ensure registration and presence of authors of accepted papers.

Workshop Topics

Each workshop subject will focus on new research challenges and initiatives in Bioinformatics. The workshops should provide an informal and vibrant forum for researchers and industry practitioners to share their research results and practical development experiences in these two fields. Workshop topics may be highly specialized, e.g., graph techniques for biomedical networks.

Prospective workshop organizers are encouraged to contact the GCB program chairs and submit a workshop proposal until May 30, 2014. Please submit your proposal electronically to contact@gcb2014.de with the subject line \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\"GCB workshop proposal : yourworkshoptitle\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\". You may also see the conference website for details.

How to submit a workshop proposal

Submissions must include

- an up to a one-page description of the topic and its relevance and value to the GCB community. - a brief description of the submitters qualification/experience in organizing a workshop - a draft time schedule for the workshop (CFP, deadlines, etc.). - a list of potential members of the workshop\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\'s program committee. - an estimation of the number of attendees - a draft list of potential authors / presenters

Titles of presentations in each workshop will be posted in the online conference program. Organizers of workshops are encouraged to prepare abstracts or additional written material that will be presented online at the beginning of the meeting.

Submitters of successful workshop proposals will be notified of their provisional acceptance by June 7, 2014.

Financial constraints

Workshop organizers and speakers must pay their expenses, including GCB registration, to participate at the meeting. The GCB organizers will help in the administrative aspects of assigning the rooms, announcements and adding the detailed schedule to the conference program. Note that the GCB cannot financially support the speakers or the workshop organizers.

Wednesday, April 2, 2014

FISABIO Summer School is addressed to graduate students, professionals and practitioners of biomedical research, public health and other biological and health sciences. This 4th FISABIO Summer School edition will focous on the area of genomics and health, with strong hands-on training sessions on genomics analyses.
URL: http://www.csisp.gva.es/en/summer-school

On April 1st 2014, the Japanese National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) announced that the Computational Biology Research Center (CBRC) has been renewed with a 7-year research plan. CBRC is a research center dedicated to computational biology with over 40 researchers and, including visiting faculty, represents a community of approximately 80 computational biology researchers. According to center director Paul Horton, the renewed CBRC will continue to pursue research and training in broad areas of computational biology, but to meet the needs for analyzing the deluge of genomic data generated by NGS adoption in medical and other fields, the renewed CBRC will emphasize new initiatives in translational bioinformatics, privacy preserving computation, and algorithms to support the rational design of genome sequences for biotechnology applications.
URL: http://www.cbrc.jp/index.eng.html